Things I noted once but forgot about

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After working with eOS for a couple of days I encountered some problems:

* I couldn’t get Midori to work with flashplayer well on my 64bit netbook. Although I managed to integrate flash into Midori using a recipe I found in the net, it didn’t work well. Midori freezes with youtube videos. Since I’m using Chromium as my main browser anyway this is not a big problem for me.

* Geary cannot search for mail. It’s not too much of a problem to me, but it should be addressed by the developer.

* Scratch doesn’t support the character encoding I need. which makes Scratch kind of unusable for me, because my native language is German and the german specific special characters become unreadable. Until this is fixed I am back to GEdit.

Despite these problems I think the elementary OS approach to keep it simple and intuitive is great. I’d love to see it grow and like to support it. So I keep it on my netbook and keep using it daily.

Owning an iPhone for several years now, I learned how easy, smooth and reliable things can be and I wished my netbook was just that. While the preinstalled Windows 7 was doing a good job I was never quite satisfied with it and it used too many resources decreasing battery live a lot.
So I went on the quest to find a new operating system for my eee PC 1015pe. I crawled the internet for opinions on alternatives to Win7 on my netbook and tried a lot of systems, mainly different linuxes but also other Windows versions especially XP because of its low footprint. At one point I have even hackintoshed my computer, witch was a great experience but sadly couldn’t be updated/upgraded.
Last week I decided to give it a last shot before returning to Windows 7. I tried an Ubuntu based distro called elementary OS.
From the first moment I was in love. The installation was flawless and all my hardware was detected. Since it is a small distribution with only the basic applications included I was up and running in a very short time. After a cold start the desktop and my wifi connection at home are fully operational in less than a minute. Then I started to click around to see how intuitive everything was. I hate to read manuals or doing a virtual tour before working with software or hardware. If the gadget can not be operated by intuition than I dont want it. Of course I read stuff when it comes to more complex functions, but for the basic tasks I do not want to read anything. Here eOS is great. Everything was right there and worked like a Mac with different icons. I don’t want to go as far as saying that a netbook with eOS is up to par with a Mac, but if you want a fast, easy to use, lightweight operating system especially for older hardware, maybe eOS is just what you need. It satisfied my needs for sure. There are still some flaws and missing functions since eOS is very young. But this is the way to go.

I recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just “yourusername@gmail.com.” Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

Append a plus (“+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

Insert one or several dots (“.”) anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn’t recognize periods as characters in addresses — we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has beensome confusionabout this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added “+donation” when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete.

My wife asked me if there is a way to erase some unwanted bloatware on her phone that were preinstalled by the manufacturer. I searched the net and found a solution here. I have not tried to root the phone yet because I do not want to risk bricking my wife’s device at this time…

Test if it recognize your device, to do this type fastboot devices, if there is a result here proceed.

Now here’s the tricky part, to enter a temporary recovery type fastboot boot recoveryRAY.img*Notice that we didn’t use fastboot flash boot ****.img here because as bin4ry said this recovery is designed to work just as recovery, if you flash it to your device it will NOT boot system anymore! This is just a temporary recovery for you so be careful not to flash it.

Now wait and your phone will reboot, you will see the FREE XPERIA splash screen and your device will now enter temp CWM recovery

Recently I borrowed an old iPad 2 with iOS 7 from a friend to see if an iPad could be my next investment and replace my laptop. So far it’s been very promising, but yesterday I came across the problem of printing. The only printer in my house is an old. Canon printer connected to my Windows Vista desktop computer. While it is so easy to connect a Windows laptop with it, the iPad isn’t that easy, but luckily there are people who already solved th problem.

Step 1. Get your Windows PC ready to share

Go to the printer settings and share your printer (printer properties–>Share this printer).

Install iTunes or the Bonjour Print Service. Since I am not a big iTunes fan I downloaded Bonjour from Apple and installed it.

Finally make sure your firewall allows access to the Bonjour and AirPrint ports. If you use the Windows built-in firewall just allow access when asked after Bonjour and AirPrint are started.

Step 2. Print with your iPad

Yes, we are already done. Just open an e-mail or a document you want to print and print. The iPad should find your printer on your network. Select it and go. If asked to authorize enter your Windows user data.

That was a short summary of the information I collected on the following three websites:

Over the years have been using the internet to solve almost all of my problems, because I found out that somewhere in this world someone had the same problem and someone else had a solution or at least an idea how to solve it. And since both of them were posting on the internet I could take advantage of them. One day I noticed that I have not posted anything of my findings and solutions yet, so I decided to start a blog and here it is. Hopefully the notes I keep in this electronic notebook will help other people as much as other people’s posts have helped me.